.j. poet

Yoshi’s is one of the premier jazz clubs in the country, internationally known for the quality of its sound system, the diversity of the...

John Santos has been playing congas, cajón, timbales and dozens of other percussion instruments for most of his life. The Bay Area’s music scene...

Lark in the Morning is a Berkeley store featuring over 1,500 instruments from around the world, many of which are handmade by craftspeople, and is owned by Eric Azumi, a musician and businessperson who bought the store to fulfill his passion for music.

In the mid-’60s, The Fillmore Auditorium and the Family Dog’s Avalon Ballroom became ground zero for the psychedelic rock revolution. Bill Graham began booking...

Manning Music bills itself as a community of teachers and musicians who love bluegrass, old-time, fiddle and acoustic music. At present, the Berkeley-based school...

Alexis Harte said his latest song, “Your Rose Garden,” was inspired by an evening he spent in Berkeley’s Rose Garden. “I grew up in...

Alphabet Rockers is a community-based children’s music project helmed by Kaitlin McGaw and Tommy Shepherd. With the help of a group of collaborators—some of...

Naima Shalhoub’s first album of original material, Siphr, covers a lot of emotional, geographical and musical ground. It plays like a suite and includes arrangements that draw on Middle Eastern and American modes. It also includes her reinvention of “Lamma Bada Yatathanna,” a song from Moorish Spain that’s more than 1,000 years old. The music was recorded in San Francisco, but Shalhoub said the idea behind it began brewing a few years before, during a trip to Lebanon, her parents’ birthplace.